Quotes About Art

One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists themselves.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

Acting has been very useful to me.

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems.

Yes, bad or mediocre ballets can be useful to the dancers and temporarily fun for the audience, but in the long run, the lowering of standards can only erode the art form we all love.

I've never been interested in philosophy, but some of Jung's ideas seem useful in helping people understand pictures and so forth.

One of the nice things about writing is you can take essentially painful things in your life and turn them into something that might be useful, or at least entertaining, to somebody else.

I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced... I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.

Big picture, it's amazing to create characters and see them brought to life in the art. And to love that art. But I especially enjoy writing a character with heightened powers that aren't especially useful to him.

I like making art that's useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it; it's a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context, you can make sense of it before and after it happens.

I'm not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I'm interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.

I want to make art that is helpful, that's useful to people, that starts fruitful conversations. That makes you think about a question that you hadn't considered before.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

The usefulness of science is sometimes exaggerated. You'd never talk about music being useful or art being useful.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.

It was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.

We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.

There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.

The idea of peer critique, of talking about each other's art - I just found it so useless.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.